Bridging the Gap: Adapting IMRaD to Meet Student Needs

Abstract

For many undergraduate and graduate students across disciplines, research reading and writing are major challenges and sources of anxiety (Huerta et al.) due in part to the limited writing instruction students receive in discipline-specific courses. Many instructors assume students have learned rhetorical conventions (Melzer) or feel too pressed for time while teaching disciplinary content (Goldsmith and Wiley). Meanwhile, for students, research writing can appear to be disconnected from “doing” research, even though these processes can productively inform one another (Carter). Our project sought to address this disconnect by adapting IMRaD into a reading assistant tool that could support students in performing rhetorical analysis on published research, which in turn would help students engage with model articles as repositories of rhetorical as well as expert knowledge within their field. To produce this tool, we performed a rhetorical analysis of 40 published research articles from across four knowledge domains: humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, and formal sciences. We then tested the tool in our experiences of reading an additional 23 articles. Analysis of resultant data showed that while performing rhetorical analyses on articles improved readers’ comprehension and overall experience—confirming existing research on the efficacy of rhetorical analysis as a comprehensive aid—incorporating our tool could result in a more confusing reading experience, especially for articles in the humanities and social sciences. Going forward, we are adapting the tool to incorporate this feedback.